Keeping freight moving in Denmark with SQL Server 2016

Efficient data management keeps goods flowing smoothly in Denmark. Danske Fragtmaend, the country’s largest national transport and distribution firm, has been moving freight for more than a century. Today, Danske Fragtmaend delivers more than 40,000 consignments each day throughout Denmark, and businesses from small mom-and-pop operations to factories rely on its services.

The firm handles logistics in a central location, where 200 dispatchers keep an eye on the movement of thousands of trucks and their cargo. Both drivers and dispatchers need the latest information to operate efficiently, so they rely on a data platform based on SQL Server 2016. The storage system includes 160 terabytes of flash memory for fast I/O and high uptimes. Throughout the day, drivers continually scan transactions with PDAs and send shipping information including GPS coordinates to the data platform. Fast access to information is essential. Ulf Preisler, chief information officer at Danske Fragtmaend, says, “When it comes to short-term logistics, you’ve got to think like an air traffic controller more than a traditional radio dispatcher.”

Because the data changes rapidly, asynchronous replication between geographically disparate datacenters was inadequate. Instead, Danske Fragtmaend runs SQL Server on Windows 2016. Windows Server 2016 introduces a new disaster recovery and preparedness feature, Storage Replica, which enables storage-agnostic, synchronous replication of data across geographically diverse datacenters. Even if disaster strikes one location, all the data exists elsewhere, so there is no possibility of loss.

Best of all, companies that combine flash storage with the latest versions of SQL Server and Windows Server can achieve a multiplying effect on performance. Danske Fragmaend’s lead software developer, Morten Vinther, ran several tests to compare the old storage stack with the new one. “After combining the new all-flash infrastructure and the features from SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016, one of our BI queries ran 9,521 times faster than on the prior infrastructure. That is much more than we expected.”